Michael's gameing and tech blog.

Total Lunar Eclipse Jan 2019 Experience.

So I have always been a big fan of astronomy, so it is no surprise that I found out what time the lunar eclipse would be tonight and stayed up to see it. I went outside my apartment, and looked at the moon, and it was indeed dark with a red tint, which was just incredible. I will have pictures of this up soon. When I first walked out, I met one of my neighbors who was doing the same thing. I…

Touring San Diego Near Manchester Grand Hyatt

Your app has been removed

Last September, Apple announced that it would be removing apps from the App Store that were not updated recently. Today I received notice that VisualBraille Notes had not been updated in a significant amount of time and that it needed to be updated to restore it to the store. Here is the message from Apple. ar 8, 2017 at 11:58 AM From Apple Dear Developer, On September 1, 2016, we announced that…

While browsing the web I happened upon an ad from Amazon of all places for a book, which is no surprise since I love to read. Normally I would quickly look at the ad and move on, but this time I had to stop and look for a second and then I just had to know more. NSFW and NSFK past this point. The title was The subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, which made me want to read the book just based on the…

So with the release of iOS 8.0 came Notification Center Widgets to iOS. These widgets make iOS more like Android devices to an extent, and this post is here to say why they only go so far.

Android widgets sit on your home screens and let you interact with the operating system. Mac OS X now does this from the notification center area as well. iOS allows for widgets in the notification center area, but Apple has made it clear that these widgets are for the user to get information, and not for letting the user input information. This means that widgets that would use the keyboard or that would get information would not be allowed.

Several apps have been pulled from the App Store because they gained input from the user or because they opened other apps. This includes the app PCalc, which is back in the App Store, and Launcher - Favorites at your fingertips, which has been completely pulled. This app was amazingly built, and was the best use of the widget system Apple made for iOS, but because Apple could not control what the app did they pulled it. I am still fighting with Apple to get my app Share Center on the App Store because it uses different frameworks to direct users to the app. We will see what happens with that next week.

I really think that Apple is shooting themselves in the foot here. Widget creators should have the freedom to write amazing widgets that extend the capabilities of the user's device, instead, Apple is limiting the creativity and innovation that this feature allows. It is never a good thing when a company limits innovation that promotes innovative thinking.